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Lemmy be like (media.piefed.social)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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Lemmy be like
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[–] 31 points 1 year ago (40 children)

I personally think of AI as a tool, what matters is how you use it. I like to think of it like a hammer. You could use a hammer to build a house, or you could smash someone's skull in with it. But no one's putting the hammer in jail.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Yeah, except it's a tool that most people don't know how to use but everyone can use, leading to environmental harm, a rapid loss of media literacy, and a huge increase in wealth inequality due to turmoil in the job market.

    So... It's not a good tool for the average layperson to be using.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Stop drinking the cool aid bro. Think of these statements critically for a second. Environmental harm? Sure. I hope you're a vegan as well.

    Loss of media literacy: What does this even mean? People are doing things the easy way instead of the hard way? Yes, of course cutting corners is bad, but the problem is the conditions that lead to that person choosing to cut corners, the problem is the demand for maximum efficiency at any cost, for top numbers. AI is is making a problem evident, not causing it. If you're home on a Friday after your second shift of the day, fuck yeah you want to do things easy and fast. Literacy what? Just let me watch something funny.

    Do you feel you've become more stupid? Do you think it's possible? Why wouild other people, who are just like you, be these puppets to be brain washed by the evil machine?

    Ask yourself. How are people measuring intelligence? Creativity? How many people were in these studies and who funded them? If we had the measuring instrument needed to actually make categorizations like "People are losing intelligence." Psychologists wouldn't still be arguing over the exact definition of intelligence.

    Stop thinking of AI as a boogieman inside people's heads. It is a machine. People using the machine to achieve a mundane goal, it doesn't mean the machine created the goal or is responsible for everything wrong with humanity.

    Huge increase in inequality? What? Brother AI is a machine. It is the robber barons that are exploiting you and all of the working class to get obsenely rich. AI is the tool they're using. AI can't be held accountable. AI has no will. AI is a tool. It is people that are increasing inequality. It is the system held in place by these people that rewards exploitation and encourages to look at the evil machine instead. And don't even use it, the less you know, the better. If you never engage with AI technology, you'll believe everything I say about how evil it is.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Literacy what? Just let me watch something funny.

    This is like the most pro-illiteracy thing I've ever read.

    Do you feel you've become more stupid?

    My muscles were weaker until I started training. As it turns out, the modern convenience that allows me to sit around all day doesn't actually make me stronger by itself.

    It is people that are increasing inequality.

    Yes, what if the billionaires simply chose not to, hm? Have I ever thought of that? Probably not, I'm very stupid.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    That's some real "guns don't kill people, people kill people" apologist speak.
    The only way to stop a bad robber Baron using AI is a good robber Baron using AI? C'mon.
    I know that's not exactly what you said, but it applicable.

    I work with these tools every day, both as a tool my employer wants me to use, and because I'm part of the problem: I integrate LLMs into my company's products, to make them "smart". I'm familiar with the tech. This isn't coming from a place if ignorance where I've just been swayed by Luddites due to my lack of exposure.

    When I use these tools I absolutely become temporarily stupider. I get into the rhythm of using it for everything instead of using it selectively.
    But I'm middle aged; which means both that I'll never be as good with it but also that it's harder to affect me long term, I've already largely finished developing my brain. I only worry that it'll be a brand new source of misinformation for my generation, but I worry that that (with the escalating attacks on our school system) it'll result in generations of kids who grow up without having developed certain mental skills related to problem solving, because they'll have always relied on it to solve their problems.

    I know it's not the tool's fault, but when a tool can do easily cause massive accidental harm, it's easiest to just regulate the tool to curb the harm.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    A hammer doesn't consume exorbitant amounts of power and water.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Do you think hammers grow out of the ground? Or that the magically spawn the building materials to work on?

    Everything we do has a cost. We should definitely strive for efficiency and responsibile use of resources. But to use this as an excuse, while you read this in a device made of metals mined by children, is pretty hypocritical.

    No consumption is ehical under capitalism, take responsibility instead for what you do with that consumption.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Neither does an algorithm.

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  • [+] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    Seriously, the AI hate gets old fast. Like you said it's a tool, gey get over it people.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (21 children)

    “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”

    Edit:

    Controversial reply, apparently, but this is literally part of the script to a Philosophy Tube video (relevant part is 8:40 - 20:10)

    We sometimes think that technology is essentially neutral. It can have good or bad effects, and it might be really important who controls it. But a tool, many people like to think, is just a tool. "Guns don't kill people, people do." But some philosophers have argued that technology can have values built into it that we may not realise.

    ...

    The philosopher Don Idhe says tech can open or close possibilities. It's not just about its function or who controls it. He says technology can provide a framework for action.

    ...

    Martin Heidegger was a student of Husserl's, and he wrote about the ways that we experience the world when we use a piece of technology. His most famous example was a hammer. He said when you use one you don't even think about the hammer. You focus on the nail. The hammer almost disappears in your experience. And you just focus on the task that needs to be performed.

    Another example might be a keyboard. Once you get proficient at typing, you almost stop experiencing the keyboard. Instead, your primary experience is just of the words that you're typing on the screen. It's only when it breaks or it doesn't do what we want it to do, that it really becomes visible as a piece of technology. The rest of the time it's just the medium through which we experience the world.

    Heidegger talks about technology withdrawing from our attention. Others say that technology becomes transparent. We don't experience it. We experience the world through it. Heidegger says that technology comes with its own way of seeing.

    ...

    Now some of you are looking at me like "Bull sh*t. A person using a hammer is just a person using a hammer!" But there might actually be some evidence from neurology to support this.

    If you give a monkey a rake that it has to use to reach a piece of food, then the neurons in its brain that fire when there's a visual stimulus near its hand start firing when there's a stimulus near the end of the rake, too! The monkey's brain extends its sense of the monkey body to include the tool!

    And now here's the final step. The philosopher Bruno Latour says that when this happens, when the technology becomes transparent enough to get incorporated into our sense of self and our experience of the world, a new compound entity is formed.

    A person using a hammer is actually a new subject with its own way of seeing - 'hammerman.' That's how technology provides a framework for action and being. Rake + monkey = rakemonkey. Makeup + girl is makeupgirl, and makeupgirl experiences the world differently, has a different kind of subjectivity because the tech lends us its way of seeing.

    You think guns don't kill people, people do? Well, gun + man creates a new entity with new possibilities for experience and action - gunman!

    So if we're onto something here with this idea that tech can withdraw from our attention and in so doing create new subjects with new ways of seeing, then it makes sense to ask when a new piece of technology comes along, what kind of people will this turn us into.

    I thought that we were pretty solidly past the idea that anything is “just a tool” after seeing Twitler scramble Grok’s innards to advance his personal politics.

    Like, if you still had any lingering belief that AI is “like a hammer”, that really should’ve extinguished it.

    But I guess some people see that as an aberrant misuse of AI, and not an indication that all AI has an agenda baked into it, even if it’s more subtle.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Guns don’t kill people. People with guns kill people.

    Ftfy

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    as an aussie, yeah, then you should stop people from having guns

    i honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the total number of gun deaths in australia since we banned guns (1996) was less than the number of gun deaths in the US THIS WEEK

    the reason is irrelevant: the cause is obvious… and id have bought the “to stop a tyrannical government” argument a few years ago, but ffs there’s all the kids dying in school and none of the stop the tyrant, so maybe that’s a fucking awful argument and we have it right down under

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I’ve never understood how a redneck prepper thinks he’s going to protect himself with a bunch of guns from a government that has millions of soldiers, tanks, machine guns, sidewinder misses and nuclear weapons.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    My skull-crushing hammer that is made to crush skulls and nothing else doesn't crush skulls, people crush skulls
    In fact, if more people had skull-crushing hammers in their homes, i'm sure that would lead to a reduction in the number of skull-crushings, the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a skull-crushing hammer, is a good guy with a skull-crushing hammer

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    you’re absolutely right!

    the ban on guns in australia has been disastrous! the number of good guys with guns has dropped dramatically and … well, so has the number of bad guys … but that’s a mirage! ignore our near 0 gun deaths… that’s a statistical anomaly!

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    Bad faith comparison.

    The reason we can argue for banning guns and not hammers is specifically because guns are meant to hurt people. That's literally their only use. Hammers have a variety of uses and hurting people is definitely not the primary one.

    AI is a tool, not a weapon. This is kind of melodramatic.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    GenAI is a bad tool that does bad things in bad ways.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    "Video games are dangerous."

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    then you have little understanding of how genai works… the social impact of genai is horrific, but to argue the tool is wholly bad conveys a complete or purposeful misunderstanding of context

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm not an expert in AI systems, but here is my current thinkging:

    Insofar as 'GenAI' is defined as

    AI systems that can generate new content, including text, images, audio, and video, in response to prompts or inputs

    I think this is genuinely bad tech. In my analysis, there are no good use cases for automating this kind of creative activity in the way that the current technology works. I do not mean that all machine assisted generation of content is bad, but just the current tech we are calling GenAI, which is of the nature of "stochastic parrots".

    I do not think every application of ML is trash. E.g., AI systems like AlphaFold are clearly valuable and important, and in general the application of deep learning to solve particular problems in limited domains is valuable

    Also, if we first have a genuinely sapient AI, then it's creation would be of a different kind, and I think it would not be inherently degenerative. But that is not the technology under discussion. Applications of symbolic AI to assist in exploring problem spaces, or ML to solve classification problems also seems genuinely useful.

    But, indeed, all the current tech that falls under GenAI is genuinely bad, IMO.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    things like the “patch x out of an image” allows people to express themselves with their own creative works more fully

    text-based genai has myriad purposes that don’t involve wholesale generation of entirely new creative works:

    using it as a natural language parser in low-stakes situation (think like you’re browsing a webpage and want to add an event to the calendar but it just has a paragraph of text that says “next wednesday at xyz”)

    the generative part makes it generically more useful that specialist models (and certainly less accurate most of the time), and people can use them to build novel things on top of rather than be limited to the original intent of the model creator

    everything genai should be used for should be low-stakes: things that humans can check quickly, or doesn’t matter if it’s wrong… because it will be wrong some of the time

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    GenAI is a great tool for devouring text and making practice questions, study guides and summarize, it has been used as a marvelous tool for education and research. Hell, if set properly, you can get it to give you the references and markers on your original data for where to find the answers to the questions on the study guide it made you.

    It is also really good for translation and simplification of complex text. It has its uses.

    But the oversimplification and massive broad specs LLMs have taken, plus lack of proper training for the users, are part of the problem Capitalism is capitalizing on. They don't care for the consumer's best interest, they just care for a few extra pennies, even if those are coated in the blood of the innocent. But a lot of people just foam at the mouth when they hear "Ai".

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Those are not valuable use cases. “Devouring text” and generating images is not something that benefits from automation. Nor is summarization of text. These do not add value to human life and they don’t improve productivity. They are a complete red herring.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Who talked about image generation? That one is pretty much useless, for anything that needs to be generated on the fly like that, a stick figure would do.

    Devouring text like that, has been instrumental in learning for my students, especially for the ones who have English as a Second Language(ESL), so its usability in teaching would be interesting to discuss.

    Do I think general open LLMs are the future? Fuck no. Do I think they are useless and unjustifiable? Neither. I think, at their current state, they are a brilliant beta test on the dangers and virtues of large language models and how they interact with the human psyche, and how they can help bridge the gap in understanding, and how they can help minorities, especially immigrants and other oppressed groups(Hence why I advocated for providing a class on how to use it appropriately for my ESL students) bridge gaps in understanding, help them realize their potential, and have a better future.

    However, we need to solve or at least reduce the grip Capitalism has on that technology. As long as it is fueled by Capitalism, enshitification, dark patterns and many other evils will strip it of its virtues, and sell them for parts.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    We once had played this game with friends where you get a word stuck on your forehead and you have to guess what are you.

    One guy got C4 (as in explosive) to guess and he failed. I remember that we had to agree with each other whether C4 is or is not a weapon. Main idea was that explosives are comparatively rarely used in actual killing opposed to other things like mining and such. Parallel idea was that is Knife a weapon?

    But ultimately we agreed that C4 is not a weapon. It was invented not primarily to to kill or injure. Opposed to guns, that are only for killing or injuring.

    Take guns away, people will kill with literally anything else. But give an easy access to guns, people will kill with them. Gun is not a tool, it is a weapon by design.

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  • [+] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    And neither does AI? The massive data centers are having negative impacts on local economies, resources and the environment.

    Just like a massive hammer factory, mines for the metals, logging for handles and manufacturing for all the chemicals, paints and varnishes have a negative environmental impact.

    Saying something kills the planet by existing is an extreme hyperbole.

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